Labour are betraying Coe's Olympic vision

Exponential is not a word in widespread usage in this motherland of the English language but the moment you look it up the cat really is out of the dictionary.

The Olympic moggy, that is. The one scratching angrily away at the face of London 2012 and exposing the grubby, greedy little secret below the preening surface.

When the mandarins of the Games-after-next and their opportunist New Labour cronies demanded their American construction guru provide 'clarification' of his decision to walk out in seven months flat, little did they know how soon and how damagingly it would be forthcoming.

Jack Lemley — the executive known as The Terminator for his forthright delivery of mega-projects such as the Channel Tunnel — gave them clarification with both barrels in the pages of The Idaho Statesman, his home-town newspaper in Boise: 'Costs are going up on an exponential basis.'

That means rising rapidly. That means spiralling out of control.

That — according to independent experts and admitted privately now by some in the inner sanctum — means the London 2012 budget is going to burst its Thames-side banks by a catastrophic amount.

Three billion? Try ten billion — and rising. And that means the inevitable imposition of an astron-imical Capital Games Tax.

Forget mayor Ken Livingstone's high-handed filching of £20-a-year out of every Londoner's back pocket. This is heading for hardship country. Fast.

Not only that but Mr Lemley forewarns us of another Wembley fiasco in the making, one with the nationally humiliating prospect of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford being among venues not built in time.

He says: 'I have never quit a project before but London 2012 is going to have huge difficulty in completion in terms of both time and money and I don't want my reputation ruined.'

Some of the reputations involved here — notably in Government — have been in tatters for some time. When it comes to ruination, the lives of people already eking out their existence on the breadline is of far greater importance.

Alarm about the real — and shamelessly concealed — cost of the Olympics comes amid concerns that some of our elderly citizens will risk freezing to death this winter because they cannot afford to turn on the heating.

At this same time, our troops are being asked to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without adequate equipment and cancer patients are either being denied life-saving drugs or being asked to top up NHS charges by buying treatment freely available in France.

Naturally we sportswriters are prominent among those delighted by the world's greatest sporting event being staged in this country.

However, there is a duty of care to keep such ambitions in proportion to the basic needs of the nation and if the politicians blithely disregard that responsibility then it will have to be argued here.

While hospitals hold out begging bowls in vain attempts to keep vital wards open, this Government gleefully spends profligate sums on pet projects to buy popularity.

After the Olympics — according to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and sports minister Richard Caborn — the World Cup. Has it not occurred to them that if England's 2006 bid had been successful Wembley would not have been ready. Let's bring football home in 2018. Another fine mess ... Mr Minister?

Not, they whisper, if the Chancellor leads another another smash-and-grab raid on the National Lottery. New Labour has been cheating on the Lottery's founding principle of financing good causes.

There is already suspicion that money which should be helping sick children and infirm pensioners — not to mention footing the entire bill for a memorial to the 16,000 servicemen and women who have given their lives for this country since the end of World War II — will be syphoned into the £2.4billion funding which the Government have already pledged to London 2012.

They will need a lot more from that pot — as well as extra taxation — if these Games are to live up to even half their promises.

To be clear, this is no fault of the British Olympic hero whose rhetoric won the bidding. I heard Sebastian Coe rehearse as well as deliver his exhilarating Singapore speech which won the hearts and votes of the IOC and I have no doubt he believed in every sentence with unbounded passion for sport and country. In so doing, he had to put his trust in his team's accountancy as well as in the accountability of those in public office.

Blair, Brown, Jowell and Caborn, meanwhile, were counting in the currency of populism. Mayor Livingstone was calculating how much expenditure for his capital improvements in transport and infrastructure he might slip under the radar into a London 2012 budget which, one has to believe, they all knew would go through the roof.

Lord Coe is being betrayed, not least in his dream of the main Olympic Stadium being scaled down after the Games to become the spiritual home for his beloved track and field athletics.

Scratch, goes the Lemley cat and Caborn lets out the secret that they want to hijack Seb's track for Premiership football.

Scratch, and the escalating cost of the Games comes out.

Scratch, and we see that almost as many permanent jobs will be lost by the eviction and probable extinction of existing businesses as temporary jobs will be created in the building of Olympia.

Scratch, and the much-vaunted legacy of regeneration of the Lea Valley looks to be a promise as desolate as those wastelands are now.

When Coe presented his vision to the Olympic movement, it was denounced as a 'virtual' bid by the beaten campaigners for Paris.

That sounded like sour grapes at the time but every wasted day and every price hike in London brings them closer to being proved right.

Unless the Government comes clean, Livingstone is reined in and our Olympic mandarins apply transparency to the spending of every penny and the cementing of every brick, London 2012 faces disaster.

Caborn keeps trumpeting IOC propaganda about construction and preparation being way ahead of recent Olympics.

Ironically, some of the most vitriolic doubts about Athens being ready in time were expressed in this green but unpleasantly governed land of ours.

The 2004 Olympic homecoming to ancient Greece was a triumph. What an exponential indictment it will be if the 2012 Games have to be taken away from London ... back to Athens.